Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

We should celebrate personal courage this
autumn. We have survived for 30 years thanks to the personal courage of one man.
He alone saved the world from nuclear holocaust. Deep in the Soviet command centre for their vast and
apocalyptic nuclear force during the most dangerous phase of the Cold War in
1983, Stanislav Petrov made the decision to overrule the technical alert
systems when computer malfunction led to false alarms about a US first strike.

Remarkable
courage

The decapitating first strike is the
ultimate nightmare in the nuclear balance of terror. Thanks to the ongoing
hostile political confrontation during the so-called ‘Second Cold War’, after
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviet leadership became
convinced that the west was actually planning a nuclear attack. This dangerous atmosphere fostered
fundamental misunderstandings of intentions. The political context makes
Stanislav Petrov’s courage all the more remarkable.

Philip
Zimbardo finds group dynamics cause evil behaviour

In actual decision-making situations like
the one Petrov faced on his watch at the command centre, group dynamics, not
geopolitical considerations, prevail. The psychologist Phillip Zimbardo has
shown how human behavior is decisively shaped by group pressure. When the enemy
is dehumanized, as it was during the deep-frozen Cold War in 1983, these group dynamics can in Zimbardo’s
view cause normal people to commit even extreme evil. Nuclear war is the
ultimate evil human act. The
number one risk factor, in Zimbardo’s view, is obedience to authority, which,
he points out, is a universal risk because obedience will always be the quality
most cherished in employees in all systems and organizations.

Personal
courage as an antidote to group
dynamics

The only antidote to evil induced by group
dynamics, according to Zimbardo, is the individual courage to resist. As anyone
who has worked in a hierarchy will know, cowardice and subservience seem to approach
being an iron law even in inconsequential matters. Zimbardo’s prescribed antidote to evil, the personal courage
to resist, may therefore at first sight lack credibility. But Petrov’s example
shows that it can work, even in a harsh dictatorship and against a background
of hostile political confrontation.

There is one other well known example of
decisive personal courage that arose out of the Soviet Union. During the Cuban
Missile Crisis in 1962, Vasili Arkhipov successfully
resisted pressure from his two fellow commanders to fire nuclear arms that in
all likelihood would have precipitated a nuclear holocaust. He was on board a
Soviet submarine armed with nuclear charges on their torpedoes when the US navy
dropped depth charges on them. Since the submarine was submerged, there was no
chance to contact Moscow to find out if war had started or not, so the group
dynamics between three men under extreme pressure decided the fate of mankind.

Map of the western hemisphere showing the range of the nuclear missiles under construction in Cuba, used during the secret meetings on the Cuban crisis. Wikimedia/Central Intelligence Agency. Public domain.

Will we act with courage when we are called upon?

It is a paradox that it was under the most
adverse circumstances of the Soviet dictatorship that personal courage was decisive
in avoiding nuclear war in two known cases. Why should we not show personal
courage who live in democracies under the rule of law? Those of us who are not among the few
deciding when to start a nuclear holocaust, nevertheless find ourselves
frequently in situations when we face the choice of acting ethically or in a cowardly
manner.

Perhaps a more relevant example for us than
Petrov and Arkhipov is Bartolome de las Casas. He stood up for the rights of
the indigenous people in the Americas as early as the 1500’s when he was part
of the Spanish colonial administration. In Zimbardo’s terms, he resisted their
“dehumanization”. Today, we face many
similar cases of dehumanization of asylum seekers and others.